Not long after this, I was on another ight and sitting next to a
white man who felt as if he could already be a friend. Our
conversation had the ease of kicking a ball around on a fall
afternoon. Or it felt like stepping out the door in late spring when
suddenly the temperature inside and out reads the same on your
skin. Resistance falls away; your shoulders relax. I was,
metaphorically, happily outdoors with this man, who was open and
curious with a sense of humor. He spoke about his wife and sons
with palpable aection. And though he was with me on the plane,

he was there with them as well. His father was an academic, his
mother a great woman.
He asked who my favorite musician was, and I told him the
Commodores because of one song, “Nightshift,” which is basically
an elegy. He loved Bruce Springsteen, but “Nightshift” was also one
of his favorite songs. We sang lyrics from “Nightshift” together: “I
still can hear him say, ‘Aw, talk to me so you can see what’s going
on.’” When he asked if I knew a certain song by Springsteen, I
admitted I didn’t. I could only think of “American Skin (41 Shots)”:
“No secret, my friend, you can get killed just for living in your
American skin.” I knew those lyrics, but I didn’t start singing them. I
made a mental note to check out the Springsteen song he loved.
Eventually, he told me he had been working on diversity inside his
company. “We still have a long way to go,” he said. Then he
repeated himself—“We still have a long way to go”—adding, “I
don’t see color.” This is a statement for well-meaning white people
whose privilege and blind desire catapult them into a time when
little black children and little white children are judged not “by the
color of their skin but by the content of their character.”9 The
phrase “I don’t see color” pulled an emergency brake in my brain.
Would you be bringing up diversity if you didn’t see color? I
wondered. Will you tell your wife you had a nice talk with a woman
or a black woman? Help.
All I could think to say was “Ain’t I a black woman?”10 I asked the
question slowly, as if testing the air quality. Did he get the ri on
Sojourner Truth? Or did he think the ungrammatical construction
was a sign of blackness? Or did he think I was mocking white
people’s understanding of black intelligence?11 “Aren’t you a white
man?” I then asked. “Can’t you see that? Because if you can’t see
race, you can’t see racism.” I repeated that sentence, which I read
not long before in Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility.

“I get it,” he said. His tone was solemn. “What other inane things
have I said?”
“Only that,” I responded.
I had refused to let the reality he was insisting on be my reality. And
I was pleased that I hadn’t lubricated the moment, pleased I could
say no to the silencing mechanisms of manners, pleased he didn’t
need to open up a vein of complaint. I was pleased he was not
passively bullying. I was pleased he could carry the disturbance of
my reality. And just like that, we broke open our conversation—
random, ordinary, exhausting, and full of longing to exist in some
image of less segregated spaces.
Not long after this exchange the man on the ight got in touch with
me. He and his wife had read one of my books and we planned to
get together. Our schedules, however, never worked out and time
passed. Then I wrote the piece about speaking with white men
about their privilege and I sent it to him. I didn’t want to publish it
without letting him know I had recounted our conversation. I then
asked him if he would respond to what I had written. He wrote
back:
When you challenged me on my “I don’t see color” comment, I
understood your point, appreciated your candor, thought about it, and
realized you were right. I saw your response as an act of both courage
and generosity.
I’ve thought a lot about our conversation since that ight. In fact, not
long afterwards I realized that I had misrepresented something I’d said to
you about my hometown. I don’t know why. I certainly hadn’t done it
intentionally, and I believed I was being honest in the moment. But after
our talk, it was evident. I told you I didn’t notice much tension between
the black kids and the white kids in our town (I grew up and went
through the public-school system of a middle-class suburb in the

Northeast in the 1980s and early 1990s). I guess it’s not that I didn’t
notice it so much as I wanted to forget it, because thinking back, tension
was everywhere. I graduated from high school more than 25 years ago,
and, except for college summers and a few months after graduation,
haven’t lived there since. Maybe it was such a constant in our lives that I
didn’t think about it—except for the overtly ugly incidents, like the time
the white kid who sat in front of me in freshman algebra turned around
and asked if I were planning to go to the varsity basketball game that
night to watch “the [racial slur] play.” I remember only a couple of
physical ghts between black kids and white kids, but cruelty, from
mostly white to black, was always only a comment away. My home and
my family (even my extended family, who were rst and second
generation from Mediterranean and Eastern European countries) were
the antithesis of that type of behavior. But thinking back, it was all
around us. It’s interesting that something in our conversation made me
realize it.
As I read and reread this response, I realized I had accepted what he
said about his childhood hometown not as the truth but as the truth
about his whiteness. I had accepted it as the truth, as social justice
activist Ruby Sales would say, about the “culture of whiteness.” The
lack of an integrated life meant that no part of his life recognized
the treatment of black people as an important disturbance. To not
remember is perhaps not to feel touched by events that don’t
interfere with your livelihood. This is the reality that denes white
privilege no matter how much money one has or doesn’t have. From
Appalachia to Fifth Avenue, my precarity is not a reality shared.
Though my seatmate misrepresented the fact of the matter, he did
not misrepresent the role those facts played in his own life. I don’t
doubt that he believed what he said at the time. And in the days
that followed our conversation, I don’t doubt the repressed reality
began pushing at the ction of the facts, which is also in its way a
truth. To let me in was to let in the disturbance of racial relations in
a lifetime of segregated whiteness. If white people keep forgetting to
remember that black lives matter, as they clearly do given their

acceptance of everything from racist comments by friends and
colleagues to the lack of sentencing of most police ocers who kill
unarmed blacks, to more structural racist practices, then they will
always be surprised when those memories take hold.